DDR Museum Berlin

In the summer of 2006 a new permanent exhibition on East Germanhistory opened its doors on the banks of the river Spree, justa frog's jump away from the Berliner Dom and the slowly disappearingPalast der Republik. The DDR Museum¹ sets out to show all facetsof life and growing up in the German Democratic Republic inbasement premises measuring just 400m². The exhibition is composed of seventeen thematic areas, rangingfrom earnest topics such as ‘border’, ‘statesecurity’ and ‘construction’ to the more diverting‘fashion’, ‘consumer goods’ and ‘holidays’.The whole space is designed as a miniature pre-fabricated housingdevelopment, the facades of which incorporate display cabinetsand drawers inviting visitors to explore their contents. Eachthematic area is given roughly the same space, and consequentlythe GDR's dozen or so popular bands get about as much room asthe Stasi.     

From Berlin to Beijing

In late 1900, while foreign troops occupied Beijing in the wake of the Boxer Rebellion, alarming news reached the German government from China: High-quality works of art were on sale in Beijing and would soon be displayed in museums in London and Paris without having a comparable display in Berlin. The Ethnological Museum in Berlin immediately sent the Orientalist Friedrich Wilhelm Karl Müller (1863–1930) as an envoy to Beijing to buy works of art. Müller was in Beijing between 6 April and 13 September 1901. This article contains a partially annotated translation of Müller’s report, including his packing lists of 117 crates he sent to Berlin in 1901. The original German text is included as an addendum.     

Soziale Stadtentwicklung in Berlin

Abstrakt Sp?testens seit es in den Problemquartieren mehrerer franz?sischer St?dte zu andauernden Unruhen kam, rückte die soziale Entwicklung in den Stadtteilen auch in Deutschland vermehrt ins Bewu?tsein von Politik und Bev?lkerung. So hat sich die neue Bundesregierung zum Bund-L?nder-Programm „Soziale Stadt“ bekannt und führt es zun?chst weiter. Dipl.-Geogr. Ute C. Bauer sprach mit Dipl.-Ing. Kurt Nelius, Stadtplaner im Referat I A, Stadtentwicklungsplanung und Bodenwirtschaft in der Berliner Senatsverwaltung für Stadtentwicklung, über die Schwierigkeiten in den Quartieren der Stadt und Ans?tze zu ihrer L?sung.     

A Berlin for Historians

On his death in 1997 Isaiah Berlin was widely hailed as a leading philosopher of political liberalism. This article takes the position that Berlin's philosophical views, particularly those on freedom and cultural pluralism, can also be construed as a valuable guide for historians working in the present, "postmodernist" climate of debate. It further argues that Berlin's character and career, the subjects already of considerable critical inquiry, lend added authority to these views. The focus is on three lengthy essays on history written by Berlin in the 1950s, one of which was first published in the first issue of this journal. The article concludes, following Berlin, that it is the responsibility of historians, as historians, to recognize the often incommensurate plurality of ultimate values to which their fellow human beings historically have subscribed and to judge, as judge they sometimes must, with that recognition fully in mind. If the result of these as well as the other choices that they make is a plurality of histories, of contending subjects, approaches, methods, and outcomes, that is only to be expected, indeed welcomed. It is freedom in practice, and infinitely preferable as such to any known alternative.     

Isaiah Berlin and the totalitarian mind

One of the important—yet often underestimated—dimensions of the intellectual legacy of Isaiah Berlin is his contribution to the demystification of the totalitarian temptation in the twentieth century. This paper starts with an apparent paradox: Berlin is described as a major figure of the anti‐totalitarian camp, yet his writings nowhere touch explicitly on the totalitarian regimes of his time. Nonetheless, it is argued that Berlin's notion of “monism,” and his unique insight into the totalitarian mind, are an indirect yet valuable contribution to the understanding of the appeal exercised by totalitarianism within the modern political imagination. Despite Berlin's highly contestable account of the origins of monism—which he situates in the Enlightenment movement—it is asserted that Berlin's denunciation of utopias remains very much pertinent in light of the emergence of new fundamentalist utopias in a post 9/11 world. Consequently, there are grounds from which to dismiss those claims according to which Berlin's work belongs to an age—that of the Cold War—unfamiliar to the present.     

Emigrated neuroscientists from Berlin to North America

ABSTRACT

The highest number of German scholars and physicians, forced by the National Socialist regime to emigrate for “race” or political reasons, were from Berlin. Language and medical exams were requested differently in their new host country—the United States—leading to a concentration of immigrants in the New York and Boston areas. Very early Emergency Committees in Aid of German Scholars and Physicians were established. Undergraduate students (like F. A. Freyhan, H. Lehmann, and H.-L. Teuber) from Berlin seemed to integrate easily, in contrast to colleagues of more advanced age. Some of the former chiefs and senior assistants of Berlin’s neurological departments could achieve a successful resettlement (C. E. Benda, E. Haase, C. F. List, and F. Quadfasel) and some a minor degree of success (F. H. Lewy and K. Goldstein). A group of neuropsychiatrists from Bonhoeffer’s staff at the Berlin Charité Hospital could rely on the forceful intercession of their former chief. The impact of the émigré colleagues on North American neuroscience is traced in some cases. Apart from the influential field of psychoanalysis, a more diffuse infiltration of German and European neuropsychiatry may be assumed. The contribution to the postwar blossoming of neuropsychology by the émigré neuroscientists K. Goldstein, F. Quadfasel, and H.-L. Teuber is demonstrated in this article.     

Berlin: Town planning under particular conditions

The development of the Berlin conurbation as a unified living and economic area was interrupted for over 40 years. The reshaping of the old and new capital of Germany is not only to be seen under the aspects of continuity or discontinuity, but also in the context of the reinforced tradition of federalism and decentralism in Germany, and of competition with other European cities. The task of the reintegration of three different parts—West Berlin, East Berlin and the surrounding countryside—requires new concepts for the region and the city. Programmes and draft plans for the entire conurbation as well as the rebuilding and redesigning of the old city centre in accordance with both history and the future function are discussed. How and in what period of time the different plans and measures will be realized remains to be seen. In the meantime, well-thought out options for long-term development have to compete with propositions promising strong impulses for quick economic recovery.     

From Batticaloa via Basel to Berlin. Transimperial Science in Ceylon and Beyond around 1900

ABSTRACT

Recent historiographies of ‘Science and Empire’ have successfully critiqued older euro-centric narratives. They highlighted how science was ‘co-produced’ through interactions between knowledgeable European and non-European actors in colonial ‘contact zones’, and how this ‘pidginised knowledge’ circulated through networks across various sites within the British Empire. This article shares and expands this approach. By focussing on continental European scholars in Ceylon around 1900, it argues that scientific networks were never confined to a particular empire. Science among Europeans was, rather, multi-lingual, mostly cross-disciplinary and always transimperial. Applying such an approach to the history of science in late colonial Ceylon allows us to uncover entanglements between historical processes that have for too long remained subject matters of disconnected historiographies: the emergence of Buddhist revivalism, evolutionary theories about human origins, the transformation from ‘liberal race science’ to Nazi eugenics in Germany, and the surfacing of British cultural anthropology.     

1953年东德事件与美国对苏东"演变"战略的起源

研究冷战高潮时期苏东地区的重大政治事件与美国针对苏东内部事态的政策演进历程,有助于更准确地认识“演变”战略的起源与性质。本所利用的档案材料表明,1953年的东德事件对美国决策层初步反省原先过于露骨的旨在激发或助长苏东内部社会紧张乃至“造反”行动的“激变”战略,开始酝酿“演变”战略产生了重要影响。“演变”战略的特征在美国对东德事件的反应中已初露端倪。这一政策转变的原因,除了原有政策在实践中的弊端和斯大林之后苏东形势的变化,也与美国决策的战略指导思想有关。     

Berlin: The Metropolis as a Production Space

Metropolitan regions can be regarded as economic areas comprising various sub-economies with different forms of economic and spatial organization. The purpose of this article is to undertake a critical appraisal of the vision of Berlin as a 'service metropolis' through empirical observation of sectoral trends and locational patterns in the city, and to establish that Berlin's urban area is a major production space with a complex fabric of specialized production districts. This spatial organization will be examined in terms of the level of agglomeration of various sub-economies with special reference to the formation of local enterprise clusters in the Berlin economic area. Berlin's specialization profile and the employment trend in the city compared with other metropolitan cities in Germany make it clear that the metropolis of Berlin is under threat as a production space, and this threat partly stems from the way in which the real estate business has developed in the Berlin area.